| These are the features that make an email system appear impressive to outsiders:- | |
| 1 - | Everyone in the company has a consistent email address such as name@mycompany.co.uk |
| 2 - | When people are away from the office they can setup automatic replies to all incoming email and automatic forwarding to colleagues. |
| 3 - | Mailing lists are available which clients can join to receive newsletters from your company. |
| Other features that are useful for internal users of the email system:- |
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| 1 - | The ability to inter-operate with a variety of existing email addresses that staff have and wish to continue to make use of. |
| 2 - | Various aliases that can accept mail and forward it to the appropriate staff member such as info@mycompany.co.uk or sales@mycompany.co.uk |
| Here's how to achieve all this from behind a demand-dial Internet connection. (I'm going to mention specific suppliers, which are ones I've used and found to work reliably, but I'm sure there are equally good alternatives out there.) |
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| STEP ONE - Buy an internet domain name which comes with an unlimited
POP3 mailbox. www.easyspace.com sell ".co.uk" domain names for £4.75 per year with a free POP3 mailbox. After submitting your credit card details the domain should be operational within 24 hours. The shorter the domain name the more impressive the email so ".com" sounds better but costs £13 per year and, unless you have an unusual company name, it will be hard to find a suitable .com domain name that's not already been taken. The POP3 mailbox lives on Easyspace's highly-reliable cluster of mail servers somewhere out there on the Internet and collects any email with your chosen domain name in the address, i.e. anything "@mycompany.co.uk". The concept is similar to a Post Office mail sorting centre putting all the mail for a company into one large mailbag.
STEP TWO - Buy and install an email server program to run on one of your internal servers. Some people think that Microsoft Exchange is the only option for a mail server. Exchange, with 38% of the mail server market, is designed to be capable of handling the email needs of really large companies. It also integrates well with Microsoft Outlook to allow schedule and address book sharing. However it also only has a basic set of features and you'll probably find yourself buying several 3rd party add-ons to do things like virus scanning, collecting mail from a POP3 mailbox, enforcing a companywide email signature and anti-spam measures. So don't be afraid to consider the alternatives, especially if you don't use Outlook as your mail client. I recommend MDaemon Mailserver from www.altn.com. It costs £230 for 25 users £475 for 50 users, and £1140 for the Pro version with unlimited users. Download the software (about 9mb), use your credit card to pay and the registration key will be emailed to you in 10 minutes. Alternatively you can use the software in fully-functional trial mode for 30 days without a registration key if you want to try it before parting with any money. MDaemon is far less resource-hungry and easier to setup and administer than Exchange. A recent add-on for MDaemon is called Groupware and it allows users of Outlook to have the same cooperation features as with Exchange. |
| STEP THREE - Configure The Email Server. Easy to say, I know, but not that difficult to do if you have the patience to read the manual. The hardest part is knowing what steps to take. Here's a list:- | ||
| 1 - | Set Up An Account For Every User. This is where you create all the
email addresses. You'll have to decide your naming convention: "firstname@mycompany.co.uk",
"surname@mycompany.co.uk", "firstname+first initial of surname@mycompany.co.uk",
"surname.firstname@mycompany.co.uk" etc.
You should create the alias of "postmaster@mycompany.co.uk" for a suitable staff member and send all undeliverable mail to them to deal with. Undeliverable mail is where mail is received with letters to the left of the @ sign that don't correspond to a valid user - often because of a spelling mistake. |
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| 2 - | Set up Domain POP. This is what MDaemon calls going to Easyspace to collect the "mailbag" and distributing the contents to the local users' mailboxes. You'll also have to set a schedule for how often to collect the mail. This depends on your Internet connection costs but I recommend a minimum of every 30 minutes during office hours and every 2 hours outside of this time. | |
| 3 - | Collect Mail From Users' Existing Email Accounts. For users who only use email at work but have been using an external account, set up MultiPOP so that MDaemon regularly collects the email from these external mailboxes and deposits it into the new internal mailboxes. MDaemon can read multiple external mailboxes including, with a bit of tweaking, web-based email services like HotMail and Yahoo Mail. Keep this going this for at least 6 months. | |
| 4 - | Forward "mycompany.co.uk" Email for Users who Access their Email from Outside the Office. If you only have dial-up Internet access it's not practical to access email from outside the office unless it's by dialling into the server. For users who want to access office email at home or on business trips you should configure all mail that arrives in their mailbox to be forwarded to their pre-existing external email address. | |
| 5 - | Configure Outgoing Mail Delivery. As you're now running your own email system there's nobody out there to deliver your email for you. You'll find that, to avoid exploitation by spammers, no Internet service provider is going to offer you the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) service you need. Not to worry as MDaemon is perfectly capable of contacting the mail server directly for each destination domain and conducting the mail transfer itself. | |
| 6 - | Enable Web Configuration. This means that users can contact the MDaemon server via a web browser to control the auto-responder and forwarding settings for their account. | |
| 7 - | Edit the Content Filter to Remove Emails with Suspicious Attachments that could Contain Viruses. These can be identified by the filename extension of the attached file and the following is my recommended list of filename extensions to be outlawed:- | |
| ade adp bas bat chm cmd com cpl crt exe hlp hta inf ins isp js jse lnk mdb mde msc msi msp mst pcd pif reg scr sct shs shb url vb vbs vbe wsf wsh wsc | ||
| I'd set it up so that offending attachments are automatically deleted and
notifications are sent to the sender, recipient, and postmaster. Note that this is not comprehensive virus protection for your email system but it's an easy step to take which goes a long way towards protecting your company against viruses |
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| 8 - | Configure Client PCs. You'll need to make the following changes in your users' email programs:- | |
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Change the SMTP server setting in everyone's email program to the internal IP address or hostname of the server running MDaemon. | |
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Change everyone's email address setting to the new "mycompany.co.uk" address. | |
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For all the users who aren't having their "mycompany.co.uk" email forwarded externally, change the POP3 server setting to the internal IP address or hostname of the server running MDaemon. | |
Other Advanced Features
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You can purchase an anti-virus subscription for the MDaemon server which extends the attachment-blocking measure described in STEP 3 POINT 7 above to make your email system watertight. |
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If you have a permanent connection to the Internet you can enable the WebMail server, that's included with MDaemon, so that you can access your company email from any web browser anywhere in the world, just like a HotMail account. |
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You can maintain your own blacklist of persistent spammers. Be conservative with this so as not to inadvertently block potential customers. Perhaps move the spam to a separate folder where it can be manually checked before deletion. |
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MDaemon Pro comes with an Instant Messaging system - useful for leaving phone messages |
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There's also an faxserver option which allows documents to be faxed directly from workstations programs. You could also make the POP3 and SMTP servers available via the Internet although this introduces a security risk unless you do it over a VPN. Uh oh, I put the word "Simply" in the title of this section so I'd better stop there. |
